For a show billing itself as bringing us "untold stories" about the "world's great wilderness", the BBC's Africa has a lot of elephants, rhinos and big cats. Yet David Attenborough's magisterial and entertaining wildlife documentary manages to live up to its promise, frequently zooming beyond the continent's charismatic megafauna to focus on its surprising and charming micro worlds, and capturing previously unseen nocturnal life.

So as well as desert giraffes battering one another with their necks, we get lizards leaping among lions to devour flies. In Mozambique's pristine Mountain Mabu rainforest, a recently identified and telegenic chameleon is passed over in favour of the beautifully balletic dance of butterflies mating atop the eponymous mount.

Even Africa's giants are shown in a new light, literally in the case of a group of black rhinos that are shown at night for the first time, revealing the usually fractious beasts to be surprisingly sociable and tender when the sun goes down.

Critics may snipe at the rampant anthropomorphism, but it's often precisely such framing that gives Africa its emotional punch. From the elephant mother watching her malnourished calf die, to the dinosaur-like shoebill bird seemingly deliberately starving a weak younger chick – these were unforgettable shots.

Given the show's ambition, parts of the series felt as if they were treading well-worn ground – the spectacle of flamingos gathering in Tanzania is incredible yet familiar, not least from Disney's lauded The Crimson Wing – but these moments are the exceptions to a norm of primates in the snow and joyful slow-mo jumping springboks.

The camerawork is, as we've come to expect from the BBC, peerless, from elaborate camera traps and remote-controlled devices to a generous use of helicopter shots that leave you in no doubt as to the sheer scale of this continent. The landscape and weather is often the star in itself. A year of Tunisia's sand dunes are compressed into 14 seconds, Kalahari's thousands of mystery circles wow from the sky and lightning transforms savannah into walls of fire.

Attenborough himself is back here walking the fine line between entertainment and overt education, and so the threats to Africa's biodiversity – "there's so much more here than we ever imagined" – are largely confined to the margins. Development and habitat loss driven by some of the fastest-rising human populations on the planet, and increasing extreme weather made more likely by climate change are parked for tonight's final episode, much like global warming was for the finale of Frozen Planet.

While it is tempting to rail against the BBC for compartmentalising the serious and lighter sides of the story, the decision makes sense. Newborn green turtles making a quixotic dash for the sea in the face of predatory birds make for brilliant entertainment. Hard-hitting stories of record poaching, deforestation, a warming continent and rising human-wildlife conflict are better saved until you have sucked people in with five sparkling hours of creatures battling to feed and reproduce.

I have too many highlights from the series to list here, but perhaps my favourite is one of the many acts of wildlife behaviour that are still inexplicable and not understood by scientists and conservationists, despite having been captured on camera: a shoal of man-sized kingfish that swim miles inland simply to circle round, and round, and round, seemingly for no reason at all.